Ode to my Liver

From the vantage point of a temperate gargoyle

I felt my senses start to undull

The abstinence produced a high

My body so used to the rotting fruit

Not the forbidden one

Not the body of Christ were he a mushroom

His blood were I a vampire bat

Vacuuming the corners of a church

Perpetually starved

Hooked on powerlessness

Looking for God in the gutter

With the beatific smile of a fool.

All of the organic processes in my body had been replaced

I did not see but identified things by their names, thus killing them

My eyes, scopes that shot meaning onto things, and bled them out of essence

My nose, a beaten tube that gulped air, desperately milking the skies for oxygen

My mouth, a creator of endless loops, a tool of destruction and pleasure, an industrial vise

I heard not the music of nature, but the individual notes of an alien world ripe with language

Only the parts of me that needed to die remained, assembling an undead creature

The only thing that could save me then was to let in something very sad and quiet

And force myself to love the waves without the ecstasy, to become human again.